Night Passage
Driving all night
nobody out on the road
listening to my truck radio
old songs singing along
remembering the old days
all my friends passed away
party times and praying for others
when it was okay
to speak your mind
heart loving
wife and kids
smoking my cigar
blowing the smoke out
exhilarated
in the freedom of America.
MY ABSENT PRESENCE
People will weep.
Maybe they’ll pray.
They’ll likely say
nice things – Oh, Christ!
–When I met them.
–Where we took care.
–How I look now.
Then all my friends
will become still
as our whole past
binds up their minds
and that’s my brand.
ANOTHER YEAR ENDING
The geese are gone.
Another winter’s coming on,
and then a sound sleep
before we wake and leap.
Another year’s ending,
and then a new beginning.
Because life needs a frame
every year’s the same.
DUCK TAPE AND CHICKEN WIRE
A man can fix any part
with duck tape and chicken wire
except for a broken heart
and a field of wheat on fire.
The crop will grow back again
but the heart will never mend.
TONY
My first dog taught me justice,
mercy, and forgiveness.
When I pulled Tony’s tail
he bit me without fail,
and then he’d lick my face.
And thus I learned ‘bout grace.
God gave a dog to Adam
both as consolation
and as compensation
for the loss of Eden.
773౺
I’m upside down in Hell deeper than a dry well.
Oh, but why am I here with crooked financiers,
blasphemers, murderers, thieves, and adulterers?
The Devil came to me and he grinned wickedly.
“You’re here because you failed to live a life unveiled.
You had your mortal faults and kept them in your heart
instead of admitting, instead of correcting.
You, no self-inventor, just let your failings foster.
You never tried to move, get better, or improve.
If you’d been more driven, now you’d be in Heaven.”
And then I woke in sweats,
aware of mortal debts.
EXACTLY!
Eggs white, eggs brown.
The yolk is the same,
exactly the same.
Albumen’s the same,
exactly the same.
White ones, brown ones,
their soul is the same.
Capetonian Dillon Israel’s dream: on starting out, the unproduced playwright and his city
Dillon Israel is a South African actor, creative, storyteller and an unproduced playwright. He lives in Ravensmead, a quiet suburb in Cape Town, near Tygerberg Hospital. He enjoys cooking, baking cakes, making desserts and he loves the outdoors. He reached out to me. He was looking for a mentor. He has a lot of energy. I can hear it in the sound of his voice as I listen to the voice messages he sends me. I came into contact with Dillon Israel in September of this year.
He is twenty-nine years old and wants to “make it”, like so many people in this country in their twenties, hungry to work in the film and television industry. He loves watching South African television, Chinese films and Turkish shows. He asks me to explain the meaning of his dreams. I tell him that there’s symbolism and meaning behind everything in a dream. We have become friends. He shares with me his hopes and his dreams. I tell him that he was born with a gift, but whether he believes me or not is another matter.
We talk about our struggles and depression, loneliness and hardships, the church, mindfulness, having an “attitude of gratitude” and prayer. We talk about our problems, the major issues in our lives that we have in common, we laugh, discuss the antics of our dogs. We tell each other that our mothers find it difficult to say they are proud of us but that we know they are proud of us anyway. We have brought happiness into each other’s lives.
By day he attends a college situated in Bellville in Cape Town. He loves his mother, his dog, Snowy, watching films on Netflix, his niece, writing, listening to Adele and gospel music, making malva pudding on a Sunday, going to the shops with his mother and, like the North American writer John Irving, being alone. Dillon Israel is a young man who prefers his own company to that of others. He lives faith and has a spiritual outlook on life. He prays, has taught me to remain prayerful in my own life and encourages me in my own faith.
This Capetonian storyteller is soft spoken, thoughtful, highly sensitive, an empath, what you would describe as a dreamer and he thinks before he speaks. Nobody has encouraged him to pursue this dream, writing for the stage. Not his family, not his teachers in high school and not the “drama people” he reached out to in the industry. Most certainly, no one has ever told him to become a poet. When I tell him that he can achieve this, he is nervous. He says that he doesn’t believe me. I hope his thinking will change his belief system.
This is why I text him on a daily basis and motivate him. I want to inspire him as much as he has inspired me. I can’t understand the world we live in where teachers do not encourage their students to read and to write. Both are difficult to master but can increase the learner’s self-confidence and help develop personal growth, improve self and lead to an individual having a fulfilling life. I want his dream to come true like mine did. I don’t want him to struggle as I did in youth in making my dream to become a full-time writer a reality. I tell him he has his entire life ahead of him. That he has enough time for the inner vision that he has for his life to manifest and become a reality. I ask Dillon Israel if he reads. He doesn’t like reading, he says. He prefers watching television and series on Netflix. I can’t relate.
I grew up in a house filled with books, rarely watching television. Books were my university, my school of life. It was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that inspired me to go back to writing after a period of illness and hospitalisation for manic depression. I found a message of hope in Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, in the novels of Fitzgerald, the masculine power of Jay Gatsby, John Updike, and in the poetry of Rilke. These authors, Rilke, brought me back to life. We come from two different generations, Dillon Israel and I. We are as different as chalk and cheese, two polar opposites. I tell him that in this industry you can’t take rejection personally.
I tell him to always be humble and kind, like the country musician Tim McGraw’s song. I give him life advice. I give him writing advice. I tell him to write what he knows, that he should write from his own life experience, that he should make characters out of the people he knows, passersby. I tell him to do a poetry course with award-winning South African writer and poet Finuala Dowling. I tell him that doing an online course in creative writing will help him. Already his English is improving. I talk to him as if he was a younger sibling just about to start out in the world. I talk to him about looking for opportunities, I talk to him about responsibility and the writing life, seeking daily inspiration. He tells me I’m changing his life. When I think of Dillon Israel painstakingly writing in a notebook on his desk I think of the poetic genius of Ocean Vuong.
Today he is listening to Jimmy Swaggart. We don’t have much time to talk. I’m working on a novel with both a modern and historical context and perspective and he has a project that he’s working on for college. I send him links to poetry by Russian Anna Akhmatova (“Memory of Sun”, Austrian-German Rainer Maria Rilke (“You Who Never Arrived”) and the North American Charles Bukowski (“Bluebird” and “So Now”). He is excited about writing. So far, he is making a lot of progress. He has disciplined himself and I am impressed by his confidence, his style of writing and I’m just happy that he is happy, that he’s starting to believe in himself.
It’s such an honour and a privilege to help another person, suffering for their art, to help them achieve their dreams, to tell them that absolutely nothing stands in their way. He might not know who Athol Fugard is, the late Taliep Peterson and Dawid Kramer’s productions that made it to New York and the United Kingdom, but I can inspire him to reach those heights. Maybe one day he gets to “pay it forward” and mentor someone of his own.
I confide in him my love of Barbra Streisand films, Yentl and The Way We Were. He tells me his parents used to enjoy watching films like that. I feel my age. We forget about the lonely journeys that forge our poetic and literary forays. The childhood that we create in our imagination, the childhood from memory. I feel that mentorship is a calling. I fear that people think there is no more reading of books to be done. Now there is the reign of social media that has taken over our access to information. I believe in dreamers. I too was a dreamer once upon a time. I say good night to Dillon and his Snowy and finish watching a documentary on Anna Akhmatova. Afterwards I write a poem on aspects of the personality affected by loneliness.
The music in the poetry speaks to me, speaks to my soul. Tomorrow, Dillon Israel will set off for college, nurture the dream of being a playwright, and writing for the stage full-time in his heart. I’ll be at my desk working on my latest novel.
Genuine Love
Don’t’ pick up love from here there and everywhere
Love isn’t love that changes cover
That demands gifts or anything.
It can’t be blown with the blowing wind,
Can’t be flown with the flowing water,
It is not spent with money
Can’t be destroyed by the passing of time.
Be constant like the sun.
Justify yourself from the dawn to the dusk.
Are you justified?
Are you constant?
Are you pure?
Ask yourself again and again.
If you are positive love is positive.
Remember and always remember
Love is constant.
It is immeasurable emotion
That can’t be obtained through material possessions
It is a connection without condition
If you are intangible
Here is genuine love
Are you in love?
Are you in yourself?
synapse home
Exley sheep coma dream
birds hand-hold squirrels
someone named Hilda
someone called Whoopsie Daisy
someone
taste of uneating
reminds of hating
compensatory Goldberg
if
if only
one thing to must learn
count to the number oops
cease crying nowsie cogito
retaaardo
olivetti womb
squeak ribb on
crab thread rod
age 18 book ray pipe
[lunar co click
lunar pi cup
lunar lee pappy]
Fripp make down bolt
bag econ mall court risk 19[manohman]88
pocket wellek
ex plod flow flower plunk
damn blake pod hard slip
things done night night nought
history concludes why not
drunk history friend why not
drunk history bomb why not
collusion unto cha-ching
degree dunk slow bing
upset so high baby king
struggle era detect click click
live lonely little mysticism phut
no books
english likely unworded finn ly
drama boy slugfest ly
patch of grass mostly
formality spirit restrict
bitter joke darko
lamb to orgy class attention
class modification agnostic corporate
working under paternity blade
morning spirit tone redeems
redemption body movements drill press home heart maternal ring
indentured standing drub
indentured standing stab
standing cockamamie
cuisine laughter better
one glass stomach
every turn attack turn solicitor
current cold kill whiskey blub
face derma play pick pace trad
symbols upon walk upon Frye book home
copy anno anon non espresso grit future fossil flip hurts now change
want change want if means
Departures
losing CO2 in the Jet2 queue,
staining Carhartt with heartache,
barcodes beep & promises pall
between staff & sightseers
& parents cheering up children
& new lovers arriving
chinos & eyes empty
into a grey tray, passing
Saint Peter with an automatic
& cutting through pictureless clouds
to arrivals, you were waiting,
& you opened your arms, like wings
Villa Diodati
like a leaf, you were ambered,
acquiescent, ambling the grounds –
gravel crunched with Converse
& a tableaux daydream:
Byron sailing, or the Shelleys
in love – & then, the villa doors
unveiled untouched antiques
& portraits eyeing every word
like the porcelain it was spoken over –
& sobering outside, ringtones
revealed Omicron will part you,
for months or more, before
the sun left for another city,
& the stars began to emerge
with the shyness of spiders
Geneviève
there you were: star-crossed
& stark, nipping the neck
of Calvinus, flicking Winstons from windowsill,
scribbled MA sonnets
& scrunched love letters smothered
under feet & frown,
Twelve Carat Toothache
cutting the silence,
your rib cage crushing, lungs
heaving in the June heatwave
with undiagnosed pneumonia
& pleural effusion,
coughing blood
& wheezing cheater
Light Years
another spin around the sun, & since, I’ve learnt that every mirror needs light: if light is c = 1/(e0m0)1/2 = 2.998 X 108m/s (James Clerk Maxwell, circa. 1864), it’s the magnetism keeping us close – if light is electromagnetic radiation (Wikipedia), it’s the life of moths – if light is a wave, it's scattering most from our hearts of silvered sand & limestone – if light is The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), then it’s you refracting all my colours – & if light is a distance, it’s always between us, because I have realised there is not a greater love poem than a blank piece of paper, or the cursor, blinking for us to begin, reflecting me in the screen where you have been waiting for light years
there are sounds everywhere
that you will never hear again
***
We’ll die of love
We’ll die of AIDS
Life bets at their highest
Prices for graves are rising
I kiss your imaginary portrait
Rain washes away memory with transparent watercolor
I love you like at the very beginning
I’m dying without you before and after you
Birds meet the winged dawn
Meanwhile the cast-iron night in my heart is growing to burst
***
the bird said it would be quiet and the air was filled with no one’s breath
and in the evening on the corner near the lake birds flocked and were silent
I watched the birds and was also silent, unable to move
meanwhile, somewhere far away, very close, people plucked up the courage
to yell when a stranger with the face of death roars artillery at them through the window
***
God looks like you and also like a section of forest burned under the snow
The rusty bones of the snowflakes show me the grinding path
I step quietly so as not to wake up the little Jesuses – not yet resurrected flowers
Nobody knows what will happen at the end of the road
Probably at the end of the journey we will all return home
After all the earth is cruelly looped by an ellipsoid
But now in front of me is a fork of cast-iron milk of the night
Where should I go: forward or into the future?
Each step seems like a step into the grave abyss
The cemetery stuck like a sticker to a shoe can’t be peeled off
A snowstorm begins and the voice of the wind begins Celans aria
The ivory of the sky dissolves in the eyes
I lose strength and reluctantly fall asleep on chest of the wind
I dream about you and it seems to me that now you are even more like God
My body is covered with a blanket of snow and I’m burning for the last time
***
white tea of the day
sugar time cubes
the powder of my views dissolves in your thick boiling water of silence
red triangles of the walls of the long night
You don’t /everything is obvious to everyone/